Downfall

  ****

  Albion refused to speak to me all day. At night, he went out with his friends. I hadn’t told him I was going back for another night, but he knew. I guess he went out so he wouldn’t have to watch me go to Gaunt House again. Heavy-hearted, I returned to do my duty.

  The coastal town theme was even more obvious this time, especially now we were on the lookout for it. Nadine had seen the same beach with its scrubby little island. This time the pickup turned off the beach onto a track into the dunes. She identified a couple of dogs in the tray, too. Owen pulled open a map and sat poring over it, trying to find beaches along the coast that lined up with a single island close to shore. But there were so many bays and islands.

  “What sort of track was it?” Jude asked Nadine. “Were they going sand-duning, maybe? That can be risky, especially with people in the tray.”

  Nadine shrugged. “Possibly. The dunes weren’t particularly sandy though. They were all covered in green shrubs and stuff. And the track looked solid, not soft. Gravel, like coffee rock or limestone.”

  “Maybe they’re going to roll off the track?” Owen speculated. “Or their vehicle could break down and they get stranded without water?”

  Nadine had also seen a gas station where a woman wearing a waiter’s apron around her hips was serving coffee out of a percolator. It showed midday on the clock behind her and she was squinting out of the window toward the pumps. Liz had seen the ubiquitous farmer again. He was talking angrily on his phone, leaning up against the kitchen door frame. His dog lay panting on the floor beside him. She had seen something else, too. She saved this until last and seemed to struggle to find the right words.

  “On the way here tonight I had to pull over. I had another vision. I think ... I think I saw Cain, on his motorbike, riding down a trail. It looked just like him and the bike looked like his, too. There was a car coming the other way along the trail but I couldn’t see it very well. It was a long way off. It was dim, maybe dusk. There was a wire fence running along the trail and a big stack of old branches and tree stumps in the grass on the other side of the fence. The stack was burning. I saw flames.”

  There was a silence for some moments after this revelation. Then Nadine groaned and Jude reached for the map Owen had been looking at.

  “We’ve got to work out where he is,” he said.

  “The other car,” Owen said to Liz. “Was it the pickup? Full of kids and dogs?”

  “Maybe,” Liz said. “I couldn’t see it. Just the headlights.”

  “We’re seeing Cain,” Nadine said. “Our visions are about Cain. Maybe he’s in trouble. We’re ... we’re seeing Cain in danger.” She started to breathe fast. “Our visions, are they of Cain’s death? All this stuff―the eagle, the gas station, the beach―it’s all showing us where he is and how he’s going to die?” Liz shushed her, acute distress in her face and Jude shook his head, swearing softly. “So Cain’s going to get cleaned up by a pickup full of teenagers on some track in the middle of nowhere.” Nadine barked a bitter laugh into the quiet room. “And this is what we invited her back in to help us work out? Thanks, Frankie, but I think I would rather not have known.”

  “We can stop this,” Owen told her. “We can protect Cain.”

  She fell silent but I could tell she was itching to say we’d have to find him first.

  “He’ll be safe, though,” I said. “I mean, God will protect him ... because of what he is.”

  They looked at me curiously, except for Nadine, who didn’t even bother with a glance. She just scoffed.

  “What do you mean?” Owen asked.

  “You know, because he’s a ...” I trailed off, unable to vocalize it.

  “What?” Jude said. “He’s a what, Frankie?”

  I looked down but replied, determined they should properly understand what they were. “A saint. Just like you and Owen are, and like the rest of you are becoming.”

  There was a stunned silence. Nadine burst out in a guffaw.

  “What a crock! Seriously, who invited the religious nut?” she added, and shot a malicious glance at Jude.

  “Why do you say that, Frankie?” Owen asked me slowly.

  “Because I know it’s true.” I still couldn’t look up. “I recognized what he was as soon as I saw the halo.”

  Even Nadine paid attention to that. “Halo?” she said incredulously.

  “Yes. Cain, Owen, and Jude ... their faces glow. When you touch them the cold falls away from your skin. You can smell clean air. They’re unnaturally strong and ease your physical pain when they touch you. They don’t need food or sleep in the way the rest of us do.”

  I risked a glance up at their faces. Liz looked frightened, staring at Jude and Owen as if she had never noticed their faces before. Nadine was still smirking but with much less certainty. Owen and Jude exchanged a look.

  “Why would those things make us saints, Frankie?” asked Owen.

  “I know what you probably think of my father but he actually does research on the saints,” I told him. “I was his assistant for three years and helped him produce his last two books. Honestly ... I didn’t really believe in Dad’s whole ‘saints who are regular people’ thing, but I do know a lot about the acts of the saints, and how they are proven to be God’s chosen, and the evidence required for canonization. Don’t you think I’d know a saint if I saw one? Saints receive divine wisdom and gifts. That’s why you get the visions. They are gifts and messages from God. And that’s why you have the urge to protect and save people.”

  “Protect us,” Owen said thoughtfully, looking at the words carved into the wall.

  “Could she be right?” Jude asked.

  Owen didn’t speak.

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Of course I’m right. Owen will tell you how often he saw the word ‘divine’ when he was doing his research on groups like yours, and how often saints were mentioned. Right, Owen?”

  “Wait,” he said, “I was talking about diviners. Another type of psychic gift, not ‘divine’ in the God-given, biblical sense. The information I found was about how those like us have been interpreted by various religions. They were understood as angels, winged and haloed, or saints, or faeries and magical folk, and sometimes witches and demons or even gods. The gift we have―our clairvoyance―it’s not ... celestial. It’s not from God.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I would expect to have had some kind of word from God if I was doing his work,” Owen said, a smiling tugging at his mouth.

  “Maybe it’s not exactly natural to have these visions,” Jude put in. “But it’s not necessarily a religious thing, either.”

  “Depends on what you know,” I countered.

  “Exactly,” Owen said. “That’s what I mean. If you weren’t Don Carver’s daughter, Frankie―the child of the saint-finder―if you were ... Wiccan, for example, then you might understand us as particularly gifted witches. If you were Hindu you might consider us devas or apsaras. If you were a scientific atheist you might consider us Charlatans or, at best, anomalies.”

  “We’re not anomalies,” Liz said. “We’re just psychics.”

  Nadine laughed. “Psychic sounds so corny. We’re superhuman.”

  “We’re guardians,” Jude said. “We have gifts that help us protect people. I don’t know about glowing faces or anything but if we are able to make people feel warm when they’re cold, or smell clean air, or whatever, it’s because we’re designed to protect.”

  My mind shied away from their mix of interpretations and I came close to crossing myself.

  “We need to focus on finding Cain,” Nadine said.

  I bent over the map book with Jude, examining the coastline. The lines, colors, and topographical features all blurred into one big hazy mass. Jude took me into his arms at the same time as I realized I was crying, tears spilling all over the map. I calmed down rapidly in his warm, clean radiance.

  “He’ll be all right,” he said, holding me gently.

 
Liz chewed her lip. “How do we know if the vision of Cain on his bike has already happened or if it’s yet to happen?”

  Owen became businesslike. “Jude and I will start work tonight. We’ll look for news of accidents involving motorbikes in country areas. I haven’t seen anything reported yet so if we don’t turn anything up then we still have the chance to intervene. But we need to work out where he is as soon as possible. Liz and Nadine, you can check news sites and call around country hospitals. Frankie, he’s looking for you. You need to think of places he might go looking. Think back. Try to remember anything you told him about places on the coast, places you saw on your travels, places special to you―that sort of thing. He might be trying to follow you somewhere he thinks you would go.”

  I nodded. Jude stood up and it was a signal that we all had to get on with our jobs. He and Owen had work to do. At home, Albion was still out so I went and sat on my bed. I tried to focus my mind on Owen’s instructions but it was no good. Thoughts zipped around my huge, solid fear like dragonflies above a stagnant pond. Saint ... superhuman ... psychic ... witch ... guardian. It was so confusing. And, dear God, despite my best effort to fix things, I’d put Cain in danger when I left. He went looking for me. All those months I’d longed for him and now, if we didn’t find him, he could die.

  I tried to think of places he could be. What had I told Cain about myself? What dreams and aspirations, which places I wanted to visit and live? Which of my friends, pets, family members had I told him about? I drew a blank. Had I ever told him anything about myself? I stared at my wardrobe door and thought until my head hurt, but I couldn’t recall a single detail I’d ever divulged. Only Cain’s words floated back to me from those long midnight conversations we’d had underground. It was as though I―Frankie, the flesh and blood girl with a life and friends, and a family and history―hadn’t even been there. Clearly, I’d been so obsessed with him I’d either neglected to say anything about me or I’d completely forgotten what I had said.

  Somehow I fell asleep, fully clothed and sitting up against the wall. I woke at daybreak, my neck aching where my head had been slumped over. I was fresh out of a dream: me and Vanessa as kids at a beach. We clambered over rocks, looking for shells to decorate Vanessa’s castle. Dad called out to us, “Come on, you two. Come with me and we will go over the sandbar to the little island.”

  “Will there be pink shells there?” Vanessa squeaked.

  “Maybe,” Dad laughed.

  We followed him across the submerged sandbar, clear water up to our thighs. Tiny fish glistened silver under the surface, always just out of reach.

  Wasn’t there something else about islands? Something to do with Cain? I sat up straight. The vision of the beach with the pickup, and the low island ... could it be the Floating Island in Land’s End? My family’s regular beach had been Eden Bay when we lived on the coast. The whole of the bay was made up of reefs and shallow pools and there was an elevated part of the reef attached to the shore via a sandbar. It was known colloquially as the Floating Island because little semi-arid shrubs sprouted out of it. It only submerged when the seas were stormy. Mum and Dad took Vanessa and me to Eden Bay almost every weekend in the summertime when we were little.

  Land’s End. How did Cain know I’d lived in Land’s End? Had Jude told him? But as I sat thinking, I remembered that first evening in the chamber, Cain asking me questions. I’d told him then that I’d lived in Land’s End ... and that I’d loved it there.